


The European Occultists

by Amy R (Brightknightie)



Category: Forever Knight, Nick Knight (1989)
Genre: 19th Century, Archaeology, Crossover, Friendship, Gen, Guatemala, Mayan Folklore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-02
Updated: 2018-07-02
Packaged: 2019-05-27 16:47:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,426
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15028889
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Brightknightie/pseuds/Amy%20R
Summary: “Adding to the problem… were the mystical properties said to be possessed by the goblets… Many European occultists believed that the Mayan ceremony… could, in fact, be the cure for vampirism.” —Early Excavations: Altun Kinal





	The European Occultists

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Merfilly](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merfilly/gifts).



**1895: Izabal, Guatemala**

Nick stepped from the riverboat to the pier. In the time it took to shoulder his rucksack and settle his hat, the Caribbean dusk turned into night. Oil lamps and candles flickered to life — behind curtains, atop poles, and affixed to carriages still jolting through the seaport’s busy streets. Nick blinked.

“Spare coins, _señor_?” A small boy appeared as soon as Nick’s feet touched solid earth. “Centavos? Pennies? Pence?”

A girl joined him. With an arched brow for the boy, she turned an appraising eye on Nick, and presented a basket of tiny, colorful dolls. “ _Muñeca quitapena_ , _señor_? Worry dolls? Tell one your trouble; she’ll carry it away as you sleep. Just one bit per set!”

“I’m meeting a business associate. I’m hoping he remembered our money.” Nick smiled. He was back in civilization, all right. Ready or not. These children didn’t look it, but: “If you’re hungry, join us for a meal?”

The children flanked Nick as he headed down a narrow street. The boy’s tunic was freshly scrubbed but black as a moonless night, while the girl’s bright blouse had been woven in all the colors of day. Nick felt the grubby layers of his travel by foot, mule, and boat. He could almost excavate himself: above, the illustrator of antiquities, in the world of humans if not of it; below, the bloodthirsty monster, utterly and eternally alone… He took a deep breath.

“Do you need a guide to your meeting, then?” the boy asked. “I know everywhere!”

“I’m sure you do. I’ve been in your town before, though, when I first arrived from Europe.”

The girl took his hand. “Are you going back to Europe now?” 

“Not yet.” Nick felt warmed from her confident handclasp to his cold, still heart. Her touch didn’t wake his beast. Maybe he was ready to be around the living again, after all. “I’m picking up someone who just came from Europe himself. We’ll head back west together.”

“Do you work for a fruit company?” The boy kicked a pebble. “Or railroad?”

“Neither.” Although, railroad tracks coming across fruit company land meant the expedition needed to finish so quickly that a night shift for cataloguing had been welcomed without question. Nick stretched for words. What could this excavation mean to children who had likely never heard of Egypt or Greece? Much less the forgotten civilization here that was surely their own heritage? Never mind vampires, neither the many who would mock a cure nor this one who wished it... “The people I work with find very old things. I measure the things and draw pictures of them, so people can learn about the things and those who made them.”

“Do you put the things back when you’re done?” the girl asked.

Nick looked down at her, bemused. He started to ask what she meant, but was distracted by the sudden end of the narrow street. “What’s this?”

The town plaza opened before them, a large stone square surrounded by buildings. Only arched street entrances, like this one, and a grand church on the far side, breached the walls. Nick had seen similar courtyards all over the world. He’d rarely seen them so populated at night. Everywhere, people sat, in clusters or alone, with bags and boxes. Many looked settled for sleep under blankets.

“Has there been a fire? Flood?” Or war, Nick left unsaid. Always another war...

The boy laughed.

“Tomorrow is market day,” the girl explained. “The first to a spot, sells from that spot.”

Nick followed the girl though the crowd. He grasped her hand tighter. Then he closed his eyes. No walls, no space, no time between him and what he must not do. Amidst so many beating human hearts, so much pumping human blood, the beast within roared up and demanded to feed in ways Nick had refused since he’d murdered Sylvaine five years before.

The Parisian ballerina had been innocent. More, she’d been human. His vampiric needs gave him no right to take her life, had she been the guiltiest felon. And she hadn’t been. Only a talented girl, barely a woman, fool enough to feel for him.

How could he have seen so clearly with her dead in his arms, and been so blind before?

Nick’s eyes snapped open. The distinctive sounds of a runaway vehicle yanked him back to the present. Through another arch, up an empty street, he saw a terrified horse bolting toward the square, pulling a cab evidently set ablaze by its own broken lantern.

Nick pushed the children against the nearest wall. He dropped his bag at their feet. Then he ran and leaped for the horse’s bridle. His weight wasn’t enough. And his supernatural strength wasn’t what it had been when he’d fed on human blood. But he pulled with enough force that the horse’s face turned toward the very fire it was fleeing. The carriage swung and crashed into the corner of the archway, just short of the square. Flames flew on shattered wood. People screamed and ran. The horse reared.

Nick took a hoof to the head.

He thought he saw the children lean over him. But they weren’t children. A man in a black suit chomped a cigar as he went through Nick’s bag, chuckling at the portfolio of drawings to be etched for publication. A woman wearing a woven rainbow stroked Nick’s hair where the horse had connected with his skull, smiled, and folded his fingers over something small.

“You’re not alone,” she said. “Your wish is shared. And has been granted to others, before.” She kissed his forehead.

Nick blacked out.

*** * ***

Nick woke to a splitting headache. One ear heard commotion; the other, crickets. He saw two of everything. Staggering to his feet, he opened his hand, something slipped… and then all felt normal again.

What had fallen was one of the girl’s miniature dolls. Made of black yarn and bright fabric, it was perhaps as tall as Nick’s thumb. Its colors reminded him of the girl. He picked it up and looked around for the children, but the square was empty. A few figures strolled or scurried on errands of their own. But the gathering of people and wares was gone. Had they canceled market day? Had he slept through it?

Nick pocketed the doll and found his bag at his feet. Puzzled, he made his way to the inn where he was to meet the expedition’s new man.

This adventurer should bring not only much-needed supplies and the season’s payroll, Nick thought. No, the letter telling Nick to come to the port in this week had promised an amazing new apparatus: a truly portable camera, able to function without glass photographic plates. Drawings and paintings could convey more detail, more depth, but the new device had speed on its side. Could they achieve full documentation of the ruins in time?

The so-called “box camera” on a dining table drew Nick’s eye as soon as he entered the inn’s common room. Mahogany wood. Brass-mounted lens. Leather straps for carrying. Nick was within steps of the apparatus before he noticed that the man sitting behind it had no heartbeat.

Both vampires stiffened. Both stared. The seated man was thin, angular, and beardless, with dark brown hair. He wore the typical linen suit of a European gentleman come south. There was little typical about the extra-wide-brimmed hat on the table, though, unless the wearer’s fear of the sun was more than skin deep.

After a moment, the seated man quirked up one side of his lips and pushed out a chair with his foot. “ _Monsieur_ Nicolas Girard, I presume.”

Nick found a half-smile of his own. “Jean-Pierre Martin?”

“Indeed.” Jean-Pierre shook his head. “For all their enthusiasm for the arcane, I take it that the board of our expedition knows you as little as they do me.”

“Perhaps.” Nick sat, slowly, trying to read Jean-Pierre’s expression. “They do know that I care deeply about what we’re learning from these ruins. And that I won’t let any harm come to these irreplaceable antiquities.” Or the irreplaceable humans working with us, Nick didn’t say.

“Glad to hear it.” Jean-Pierre watched Nick’s face.

Nick realized the man was trying to read Nick’s expression, too. There was something familiar about his gaze. It was almost as if Nick faced one of his own siblings, for all that de Brabant eyes were famously blue, and this man’s deep brown. If this were another of Lacroix’s converts, surely Nick would sense it? He didn’t.

“Blast it,” Jean-Pierre burst out, “you’re not an Enforcer, are you?”

“No!” Nick considered. “Do you often run into Enforcers, _monsieur_ Martin?”

Jean-Pierre set a protective hand on the box camera. “There may have been a misunderstanding.” He dropped his eyes. “I no longer engage assistance in photography.”

It sounded to Nick as if Jean-Pierre had lost someone to an Enforcer intervention. He wanted to offer sympathy. But though both men seemed equally surprised by running into a fellow vampire, Nick had suspicions. Lacroix. “Did my master send you?”

“No!” Jean-Pierre considered. “Does your master often send strangers after you, _monsieur_ Girard?” 

Staring each other down turned into laughing too hard to breathe. If they’d needed to breathe.

“Ahem! _Señores_!” The innkeeper interrupted. “It’s a tad late for such mirth, don’t you think?” He pointed toward the ceiling, and the customers sleeping upstairs.

“Quite right, _monsieur_.” Jean-Pierre inclined his head and pulled out his wallet. “My — our — apologies. May I buy a last round for the room before you close your cellar for the night?”

The innkeeper blinked. He took quick inventory of the room’s occupants. Of Nick, the newcomer, he asked: “What’ll you have?”

Nick lifted his chin. There was no way this ended well. “Same as he’s having.”

The scent was wine. Ordinary, unmixed, fermented grape juice. Nick managed to swallow, but he was out of practice hiding this limitation.

Jean-Pierre saw. Holding Nick’s gaze, he drained his own glass without flinching. He set it on the table and toyed with its stem. “We’ve got weeks of travel together. And then months of work in the closest conditions.”

“Yes.”

Jean-Pierre leaned back in his chair and cocked his head. “ _Monsieur_ Girard,” he spread his hands, “what would you say if I told you that…” He pursed his lips. “That I will hunt only animals throughout our venture?”

Nick’s jaw dropped. “You’re a carouche?”

“Would it matter if I were?”

“No, no, of course not.” It was a half-truth. Nick wrestled with the old prejudice. He’d like to blame Lacroix, but Lacroix had only aimed Nick’s own arrogance and fear. “ _Monsieur_ Martin, that will be very practical, across the jungle and at the dig alike.”

Relief swept all else aside. Jean-Pierre would bring no temptations into Nick’s life that weren’t already there. He wouldn’t endanger the workers, or stalk the closest village. Yet, as questions boiled up from his solitary hopes, Nick’s tongue froze on the obvious reply.

Nick couldn’t admit that he, too, now lived a carouche’s life. 

Instead, he joked: “The only unlimited resource we have is mosquitoes, I’m afraid.”

His arm brushed over the tiny doll in his pocket.

*** * ***

**1895: Altun Kinal, Guatemala**

Ticks had come as the mosquitoes had gone. The bugs didn’t torment Nick or Jean-Pierre like the others. Neither did the fevers. But the change reminded Nick that the year was rushing on. The expedition had to finish before the railroad or rainy season arrived.

And they hadn’t yet found the goblets whose legend had brought them all here.

Nick unlaced his bedroll from the inside. He stretched, brushed off his clothes, put on his boots, and stepped out into the swift dusk. Like the other European expedition members who had set up housekeeping inside the grandest of the ruins, Nick slept in a cocoon made by slitting his mattress pad in half and sealing the opening as best he could. For the humans, these fabric envelopes fended off biting insects. For the vampires, stray sunbeams.

“Productive day?” Nick joined the European men sitting around the fire. The local workers always returned to their village at sunset, though it was a long hike down switchback trails.

“No complaints.” George Williams, the expedition leader, gestured at wooden crates by Nick’s workbench at the center of the clearing. “Enough new portables to keep you two busy for a while, anyway, now that you’ve finished the floor plans and elevations. I wish we could get some of the workers to stay with you. Scrubbing moss from that big stela isn’t a precision task.” He sighed. “I just want to see all the glyphs before we have to go. Decoding could take a lifetime, but only if we have the code to start.”

“Generations of wisdom tell the locals not to linger here overnight,” Jean-Pierre reminded him.

“If only that wisdom remembered why!” Nick tapped the little doll he’d taken to wearing on a cord around his neck. “That could be the clue to put us on the right track, not only to finding the goblets themselves, but how they work—” he corrected himself “—were believed to have worked.”

“Could Schliemann have found Troy without the Iliad? I say, it doesn’t matter.” George heaved himself to his feet. He looked each of his men in the eye by turn. “Eventually, someone would have found Troy, because Troy was there. The Conquistadors were fools to destroy the writings they did. Can we say that any nation would have been wiser at the time? We have the folktale that brought us here. Someone is going to find those goblets, because they’re here. Let it be us!”

The team responded with wry chuckles and light applause. They agreed. But they’d heard it before.

“Humph.” George sat down. A faint blush highlighted his cheeks. “Ho, Martin? What do you say to a song to wrap up the evening?”

“You won’t have to ask twice.” Nick smiled.

“Girard, you are a disappointment.” Jean-Pierre raised his eyebrows at Nick. “With your knowledge of music, you should take your own turn at this.”

“Oh, no!” Nick spread his hands. “Without an instrument, I bow out.”

Jean-Pierre got everyone laughing with a number from _The Pirates of Penzance_ , a recent English operetta. Then he sang a _bel canto_ pastiche in French, which everyone enjoyed, and a few understood.

The others wound down for sleep in the main chamber. Nick and Jean-Pierre went to sort artifacts. Under the full moon, the vampires could see very well. Other times, they’d used candles. Early in the season, the giant local fireflies, with a steady glow totally unlike the familiar northern flickering, had lit their work, too; but the fireflies had dwindled with the mosquitoes.

“This merits one of your sepia and watercolor paintings.” Jean-Pierre lifted a panel that had been part of a stela. “Look at the glyphs here.”

Nick settled the panel on his workbench, and handed back a lintel of carved sapodilla wood. “Photograph for this one. People will find it hard to believe the wood is as old as the stone.”

“Photograph, drawing, photograph, plaster cast…”

Nick watched Jean-Pierre root through a crate. Little went into the pile to be tallied by measurements only, and nothing to the side for leaving behind. “You’re doing it again.”

“What?”

“Even if we could get it all to Europe intact, the Society has no place to put it. The academics want the glyphs. The funders want the biggest stela we can move. Everyone wants the goblets. No one wants the odds and ends.”

“Except us? I know, I know.” Jean-Pierre put his hands in his pockets. “But what if we end up abandoning the one thing we need? We don’t even know what the goblets look like!”

“Then we’ll just have to come back.” Nick worried about that as much as Jean-Pierre, he guessed. “Here, let me sort these. You prepare your emulsion paper and magnesium ribbon.”

“They’re called film and flash. Film. And flash.” Jean-Pierre went to retrieve his tools. “Don’t let the language get ahead of you, my friend.” 

“Have you ever fallen behind?” Nick asked, digging into the crate.

The men had learned much about each other in their months together. Jean-Pierre had served as a mortal in the army of the First Republic; Nick, the Fifth Crusade. They shared passions for painting and this new science of archaeology. They had built trust through shared privations, hunting jungle animals, and shared vulnerabilities, dodging relentless sun.

Most importantly, Nick had learned that he wasn’t alone. They’d mutually confessed their desires to be human again, drawn out by the goblets. After all, a legend of a cure presupposed someone seeking a cure, didn’t it? They’d debated. But all the wonder that confidence brought Nick was nothing beside learning that another vampire had chosen to abstain from human blood. Obvious though it was that neither was killing humans here and now, Nick had only slowly realized that animal blood was no more Jean-Pierre’s preference than his own. Both had chosen a code that spurned the beast within. Both had chosen to respect humanity. Nick felt that he’d found his first true brother-in-arms since the siege of Damietta, his last battle under the sun, his last absolution with his soul shriven clean. For the first time, with Jean-Pierre, Nick was able to put his choice into words. And then he saw that he didn’t have to. He was understood.

Yet for all the men had shared of their human pasts and hoped-for futures, they’d almost never mentioned their vampire present.

“I know someone who scorns to fall behind,” Jean-Pierre smiled wryly. “She doesn’t tolerate missteps.”

“Ah, now, I mostly get laughed at.” Nick thought of Janette in her beloved Paris. He shook his head, and started measuring the items systematically, watching especially for anything matching a known glyph. “So back to your theory of the ceremony. The roles are reversed?”

“Right. If the shamanic priest conducting the ritual were a vampire, it’s just business as usual, even with the goblets. Why would anything change for him? Surely the vampire has to be the sacrifice.”

Nick tapped his doll-pendant. “There’s more to recovered humanity than instant mortality, I hope.”

“Yes! But the shamanic priest would be removing the vampire, that darkness, from the person it had been in. What our folktale doesn’t hint is where that darkness goes. Can it dissipate into nothingness? Does it afflict the world like an escapee from Pandora’s box? Or did the shaman become a vampire by the act of curing vampirism in another?” Time passed. The men worked. Eventually, though, Jean-Pierre set down his tools, and picked up the conversation as if he’d never put it down. “Or is this all just wishful thinking, and the cure demands a human sacrifice, after all? I won’t do it, Girard. I can’t — I can’t go back.”

“I know.” Nick kept his eyes on his ruler and string, fighting the tide of memory. Drinking and possessing and killing and alone. Alone. Again. And again. “How long since you…?”

“Around a century,” Jean-Pierre whispered. “It took me over a hundred years to stop. It’s been about as long since.”

Nick’s fingers stilled on his tools.

“You?” Jean-Pierre asked.

“I—” Nick swallowed. A century? How could he survive a whole century like this? “It’s been five years.”

“Every night counts.”

Nick froze. The memories crashed down around him. He couldn’t see through them. “After so long, something inside me finally broke.”

Jean-Pierre was silent. Until: “I’d rather think something finally healed.”

Nick clawed his way from past to present. His eyes focused on a simple cup in his hands. Carved green stone. Jade? Squat cylinder. Intact base. He turned it around and found a high-molded glyph staring back at him.

A familiar glyph. 

“Martin, why do we say that the vessels we’re looking for are goblets?”

“The folktale…”

“Do you think maybe we translate ‘chalice’ when someone says ‘sacred vessel,’ without thinking?”

Jean-Pierre joined Nick at his workbench. Nick didn’t release his grip on the cup, but opened his leather portfolio of drawings to a painstaking reproduction of an altar frieze. He held the cup above the panel it embodied.

Both men stared. Wide-eyed. At the cup. The drawing. Each other.

They had one!

Where was the other?

They dove for the crates.

*** * ***

Nick watched from inside the largest ruin as the human team members left for the village. The funerals would start at noon. He wished he could go with them. He wished he could have saved the four local men brutally murdered in two nights. He wished he could never lie again...

When Nick didn’t see even the crown of a hat or thrust of a hiking stick anymore, he worked his way around the edge of the main chamber. He dodged stray sunbeams from fallen stones. Then he dove under the edge of the thick blanket they’d rigged as an isolation tent for the supposed sick man. “They’re gone.”

“Did they buy it?” Jean-Pierre turned over on his bedroll. “I’m hardly the most realistic fever victim. And it’s out of season, too.”

“In this heat, no one could tell the difference.” Nick sat cross-legged in the low sanctuary. He tried to think through waves of emotion. What was true? What was logical? Everything had happened so fast. “You were shaking, incoherent, and miserable. They all endured the real thing, themselves. They were happy enough to leave me to watch over you.”

“Miserable, yes.” Jean-Pierre leaned back again. He put one arm over his eyes and reached out his other hand for Nick’s. His voice dropped. “Four men... and we’re so useless we can’t even go to their funeral in the daylight to tell their families we’re sorry.”

“So you didn’t kill them?”

Jean-Pierre ripped his hand away and sat up. His eyes were wide. His brow furrowed. He looked no more than a breath from sprouting fangs.

“Forgive me,” Nick spread his hands. “I had to ask. It’s obviously one of our kind. He — or she — picks off men from the end of the column on their way home at night, and leaves the bodies to be found by the others on their way in the next morning.”

After a moment, Jean-Pierre nodded. “I’d better ask you the same.”

“I didn’t do it, either.” Nick swallowed. His only comfort was that he believed Jean-Pierre. Trusted. Understood. That connection wasn’t worth the men’s lives lost. Yet it was worth something. He was not truly unique, not fully alone, not the only one who’d felt the agony of this false choice. “So there’s another.”

“Or others. Could it be the Enforcers?”

Nick started. “Surely the expedition can’t be seen as revealing the secret. Can it? As far back as I remember, eccentrics and academics have poked into the arcane without Enforcer interference. Like I told you about Leonardo. And Hans.”

“Maybe we’re too close. Maybe they know something we don’t about that folktale and the goblets… cups.”

Both men looked at the leather pouch holding the one cup they’d found, the modest jade piece embossed with the glyph that matched the frieze that matched the folktale. Could it be their salvation? Nick wanted it so much that his neck and chest strained with the yearning. Nick snagged the strap, pulled over the pouch, and set the cup between them.

“Not much use without its mate.”

“Not much use without a translation of the glyphs.”

Jean-Pierre smiled slyly. “I still want it, though.”

“Yeah, me too.” Nick grinned back.

“It’s all ending, isn’t it? The surviving workers won’t come back. Smart men. Our team will scramble on for a few weeks, maybe—” Jean-Pierre looked up wildly. “We have to get them to leave. We have to get everyone to leave tonight!”

“I know,” Nick said. Whether it was the Enforcers or Lacroix, the killings wouldn’t stop until the expedition abandoned the site. Nick suspected Lacroix until proven otherwise. While Nick hadn’t sensed Lacroix here, that meant nothing if Lacroix didn’t want his presence known. Nick had left Europe as soon as he could after his murder of Sylvaine. They hadn’t spoken since. Nick wasn’t ready for the fruitless torment he knew that exchange would bring. He bit his lip. “I’d almost rather think it’s the Enforcers. But I suspect someone else, someone specific. There’s so much I haven’t told you.”

“We both have enemies.” Jean-Pierre snorted. “We both have families.”

Nick toyed with the little doll on the cord around his neck. He took it off and looked at it. Idly, he set the doll inside the cup, winding the cord around the glyph.

“When the team comes back from the funeral,” Nick said, “we should have a meal, and remember those we’ve lost. Then your fever should take a turn for the worse.”

“Got it,” Jean-Pierre nodded. “Not so bad that I’d die overnight, but bad enough that we have to leave immediately with only what we and the mules can carry. We can make it to the second village before sunrise. We’ll plan to send people back, but—”

“But it will never happen,” Nick finished. “Not for years and years, anyway.”

They fell silent. The silence lasted.

Nick, holding the cup, far away in his thoughts and memories, assumed that Jean-Pierre had fallen asleep. It had been a long two days. Then he felt his friend’s hands overlap his, also holding the cup in which they’d placed such hopes.

“If I may,” Jean-Pierre said softly, “This isn’t your fault. You didn’t do this. The killer did.”

Nick grimaced. “If only we’d found the other cup! It wouldn’t make this right, of course. But if it had to come to this, I wish we were going away now with two of them.”

Suddenly, there were indeed two cups. Jean-Pierre held one. Nick, the other. The doll’s cord went around both.

Nick’s head pounded madly. He saw the two cups. He also saw two bedrolls, two tents, two pouches. He heard Jean-Pierre’s voice. He also heard nothing but the shifting branches outside the ruin. He leaned back and reached for his aching head.

The doll’s cord broke… and everything seemed normal again.

Nick was the only one in the tent.

Jean-Pierre was nowhere to be found. Not then. Not when the team returned. Not when they left. Not ever again.

Nick held on to what they’d found together. When someday the cup shattered, it was because the faith endured.

 

**— end —**

**Author's Note:**

> **Disclaimer.** This is fanfiction of _Forever Knight_ (and _Nick Knight_ ). Please don’t mistake it for anything else. (Worry dolls exist. Vampires don’t.)
> 
> **Beta-reading.** Thanks upon thanks to Skieswideopen! She generously parachuted in and made wise recommendations. This story is better for her guidance! (If only I’d been able to implement all her insights!)
> 
> **Inspiration.** In the 2018 FKFicFest game, Merfilly requested a crossover between the pilot and series in which the Nicks glimpse differences in their lives. The original Altun Kinal dig seemed an almost canonical moment of convergence.
> 
> **Guatemalan folklore.** My familiarity with Mayan myth is pitifully thin. Yet I didn’t want the European vampire myth barging in unmonitored by the local myths. So I hope that the child characters respectfully invoke [Ixmucane](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chirakan-Ixmucane), to whom the sun god apparently delegated the ability to grant wishes in one telling of the [worry doll](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worry_doll) custom, and [Maximón](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxim%C3%B3n), an ambiguous trickster who still guards his people in whatever guise. (I don’t know that people sold worry dolls in the nineteenth-century as they do today, but it seemed the most compact exposition.)
> 
> **Canon.** Altun Kinal and the cups come equally from _Nick Knight_ and “Dark Knight.” Sylvaine, the murdered ballerina, comes from “Love You to Death.” Nick worked with “European occultists” (“Let No Man Tear Asunder” and “The Fix”) long before this expedition, and he fell into the trap at Khartoum (“Faithful Followers”) not too long after. Stretching for a point, I associate this Jean-Pierre’s photography with his canon home in a defunct cinema. Making Jean-Pierre younger than Nick, with an earlier start on abstaining, supports what I feel I see; it isn’t mandated by canon.
> 
> **Works consulted.** I read _Jungle of Stone: The Extraordinary Journey of John L. Stephens and Frederick Catherwood, and the Discovery of the Lost Civilization of the Maya_ (2016) by William Carlsen. The arrival of “The City at the Beginning of the World: The only Maya city with an urban grid may embody an ancient creation myth” by Lizzie Wade in the July/August 2018 issue of _Archaeology_ was happy timing. I also watched a few documentaries, including _Plunder: Maya Treasure Hunters_ (1989). And I read many Wikipedia pages.
> 
> **Thank you for reading!** Please let me know what you think. How can I do better next time?


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